Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City
September 9, 2007
The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
The Reverend William A. Greenlaw, Ph.D., Rector
Deuteronomy 30:15-30
Psalm 1
Philemon 1-20
Luke 14:25-33
 

   
     There is no question: today’s gospel lesson is a real lulu.  “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”  These words hardly seem to affirm traditional “family values.”

     Now although a part of me wonders what the religious right might do with these words, appointed for this morning, the real question is of course what we do with them.  For the whole of our gospel lesson is about things being turned upside down, of our needing to be very savvy, and of making pretty radical decisions—which recalls for me the famous preacher mulling over the implications of  this very passage by musing, “if I’m following Jesus, why am I such a good insurance risk?”  For it would seem that at least to the insurance world, a sign of stability, safety, caution is being an active member of a church.

     I kid you not when I tell you that around the time of our fire in the early 90s, I heard folks from our church insurance company complain of all these churches starting soup kitchens and other social ministries—inherently “risky” activities likely to result in more insurance claims and ultimately higher rates.  If you want good rates and low risk, the message was clear: you should be sleepy, cautious, and, most of all, “normal,” like churches are supposed to be.

     We often speak of love being at the heart of things, and that loving those closest to us, namely our families, is of God.  There are certainly plenty of proof-texts that would make this altogether clear, starting with the Ten Commandments.  And yet, there are, in fact, many things we allow to take precedence for us over family.  How many of us have left our places of origin to follow a career, or our destiny?  How many of us spend so many hours in the demands of our jobs that there is precious little time for our family, for spouses, lovers, even our children if we have them?

     In other words, as one commentator puts it, the shocker here is not that something should have a higher priority than family, but that that something should be God, or following Christ in our lives.

     When we are invited to the heavenly banquet, what is our response?  When we are asked to follow and to take up our cross, what is our response?  How about giving up all our possessions?  It so easily seems too much.  All too often the best we can do is to send our regrets.  The demands, the necessities, the craziness of our lives, certainly including family obligations and economic necessities have gotten the better of us.  We cannot cope with it all.  And then we are asked for more.  Our Lord asks for more.  The church asks for more.

     Now I will make a confession.  For most of my life I have somehow thought, even though a part of me knew better, that I could best approach questions such as these by stressing the need for grasping the bull by the horns and just doing it, of deciding and getting on with it.  If you believe it, you say “yes” to it.  Straightforward and relatively simple.

     Like the people of Israel in our lesson from Deuteronomy, the choices are clear: good and evil, blessing and curse.  We can be complacent and follow the gods of our own making, or we can discern that the way of life is the way of God.  We need to get it together.  Now.  The choice is ours to make.

     The recent history of this parish is eloquent testimony to what can be done by having priorities clear and making decisions and being about the business of being the church in the world, of being willing to say “yes” at crucial junctures—when such an answer involved risk and a whole lot of faith.  We can all be justly proud of what has happened here.

     But I am finding that as the years pass, such “heroics” are becoming more and more difficult.  Maybe it is because we have an established and highly complex program here—and just keeping that going has taken a great deal of  our energies.

     Maybe we are, maybe I am getting older and more conserving, if not, God help me, more conservative.  Maybe we are, maybe I am, getting older and wiser.  Take your pick.

     But also, it has become much clearer to me that these issues have just as much to do with the “inner” as with the “outer.”  Although our gospel for today would seem to be fairly straightforward, the question of where we are on the inside, of where we are spiritually in the deepest levels of our being is going to have everything to do with how we answer the questions of today, of how we understand what is before us, of what is asked of us.

     I am so very grateful for the very large chunk of sabbatical leave time that I have just returned from.  True to form, I did a fair amount of “doing”—and especially my trip to China pushed and pulled and stretched me in startling ways.  I have no doubt that aspects of that journey—which also included Thailand and Hong Kong—will come out in various ways, and I look forward to focusing on some of those things directly at a gathering after the coffee hour on Sunday, October 21.

     But happily, my time away also involved a good of “being,” rather than “doing.”  Many of you know that for quite a long time, I have been intent on spending a good part of every summer vacation in Zermatt, Switzerland, at the foot of the Matterhorn—and of course that simply had to be a part of my recent time away.

     I have most often spent at least a week, sometimes two weeks by myself, with Jane usually joining me later on.  She has often observed that when she joins me there after my time alone, she finds me considerably “kinder and gentler” than when I departed—all to the good!

     But the reason for that is simply this:  I almost fell into the discovery that spending time alone—really alone and quiet both in an outer but also an inner sense,  that place of extraordinary beauty does something to me.  I don’t mean just a break away from the usual craziness so that I come home refreshed for at least awhile—until reality catches up with me once again.  Rather, I mean a deeply spiritual place where God is present in a deep and profound way.  Of taking long hikes alone, some of them quite physically demanding, but finding in them prayer coming quite spontaneously.

     Of finding fairly often old, rustic, quaint little chapels in little Alpine villages or simply on the trail, redolent of an old Roman Catholic tradition that I had never much respected.  Of discovering that I could spend an hour or more in them, of finding meaning in lighting a candle, and of being open to God in a way I can only describe as transformative.  Of “listening” more than “speaking.”  Of praying for the people of this parish by name, of praying for our life and ministries here.  Of learning once again to pray for my own deepest inner needs.

     If Jane found me in a different place, and if I sometimes returned home and some of you have sensed I was in a different place, it was quite simply that I was in a different place—a place I have learned I must honor and allow to grow in myself, hard as that can be in our cacophonous world.

     But my natural tendency when things once again things get crazy, unbalanced, out-of-hand, as they surely will, has been to revert to the old way of struggling—and dreaming of returning to Zermatt.  “If only I can hold out till summer!”  Or most recently, it was, “if only I can hold out till Easter, when my sabbatical beings.”  And hanging on for dear life until then.

     But as a remarkably perceptive friend put it to me awhile back, “why do you literally have to return to Zermatt?  Can’t you give yourself the space to find that very same reality right here, right now?  Isn’t God as surely present here as there?  Maybe you need to find a way to cultivate your own ‘inner Zermatt’ even in the midst of New York City.”

     Of course, my friend was right.  And so, when things get crazy, when the demands seem altogether too much as they surely will, I need to learn to stop, to be still, to breathe, to be in touch with my body, to open myself to God’s presence wherever I am, and to find myself in prayer.  When I can do this—which I confess I’m still not very good at—the peace and Spirit of God almost overwhelm me.  In so doing, I find myself once more—and I am in a different place with myself and with those around me.  And once again, I find I can be at least a little more open to God’s call, to the decisions I must make, to the demands I must respond to, to finding the path I must walk.

     I know that most of you have your own special places, your own special experiences where you have found God remarkably present.  When things become crazy, when you are struggling with holding it together through whatever it is you are facing, allow yourself to stop—and conjure up that experience and those hallowed memories, and breathe, and listen to your body, and open yourself to discovering that God is as present right now as God was in those sacred memories.  In so doing, you too may find yourself a little more open to God’s call, to the decisions you must make, in finding the path you must walk.

     Jesus is asking us is to engage the fullness of life with the fullness of ourselves.  That is what our gospel lesson is about.  What really matters is that we are in touch with the ground and source of our life, and that we live as fully into that as we are given the grace to do.  That in true surrender comes a fullness and abundance and love we could never have imagined before.  That in the giving of ourselves and of all he hold dear, we find the way of life.

     We are not masters of our own destiny, even though so much of our lives is premised on such a notion.  We can race furiously until we are raced out and can race no more.  Or we can try a different tack.  We can realize that our hearts are as important as our heads and our wits in making our lives livable and even in being faithful to the gospel.  Maybe more so.  Jesus asks, after all, not just for intellectual assent, but for our hearts, in love, and commitment, and discipleship.  He wants our center, not what’s left over.   But if he has our center, there is more left over than we could ever have asked for or imagined.

     I close with a word from Meister Eckhart:  “The seed of God is in us.  If you are an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up into God, whose seed it is, and its fruits will be God-fruits.  Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds grow into nut trees, and God seeds grow into God.”

     Amen.